Word Of Mouse

Porto is a stunningly beautiful city. There are no words to describe it. The approach, through cobbled streets around the edge of a gasworks, gave no clue as to what was in store for us. The street we were following got narrower and twistier, and suddenly joined on to a large straight boulevard headed for an imposing statue in the distance: this turned out, once we reached it, to be an imposing war memorial in the centre of a large roundabout around the edge of a park. We had lunch here.

The statue made a big impression on me: in contrast to some war memorials in which heroic figures are planting flags in the name of their country, around the edge of this one the soldiers were mired in the desperate confusion of battle, struggling to manhandle cannon over the mud amid fallen horses, dead comrades and conflicting orders. I thought that this must be a much more honest portrayal of what battle in the nineteenth century must have been like.

After lunch, we embarked on yet another fruitless search for a new back tyre: regular readers will recall that the Finnish tyre, purchased with much fanfare and celebration in Leon to replace our previous duff tyre, gave up the ghost in turn without even doing 200 miles. Two hours and six bike shops later we gave up, and walked the bike through the old quarter to the elegant new metro bridge that spans the gorge of the Rio d'Ouro high above the town. Porto drowsed below us in the golden light and warmth of late afternoon, a sprawl of wharves, old sailing boats and jumbled red tile roofs climbing up on either side of the river.

On our way out of town we followed a straight road up away from the river, turning off to avoid the motorway up a sharp hill. Stopping at the top, we were suddenly hailed by a couple of local kids, soon joined by several more, who were thrilled by the sight of Bramble and keen to have a ride: we were happy to oblige. They were charming and talkative, one of them with excellent English serving as translator for the others. Unfortunately we have forgotten their names, but we took photographs of them riding on the back of Bramble and promised to post them here on the website. Guys, if you read this, hello and it was a great pleasure to have met you!

From the campsite at Madalena (unremarkable apart from being very difficult to find) we set off the next day for the long ride south, round the large estuary at Aviero and back out to the coastal campsite at Praia de Vaguieros. The ride was pleasant enough but not very memorable, apart from a nightmarish few km of busy dual carriageway around Aviero itself before the road regained its peaceful aspect on the far side. The campsite shown on the map at Vagos took some tracking down, at a time when we had both really had enough and wanted to be there after what had become an unintentional mustoe. The campsite turned out to be some seven km out of town on the beach road, and not in any way related to Vagos at all. We pitched tent in a state of exhaustion, but managed to find enough energy for a game of pinball.

This campsite had the most vicious and numerous mosquitoes of any that we have stayed in, ever - we had to beat a retreat to the interior of the tent to eat our supper in peace, and only after spending ten minutes on an intense mosquito-squashing spree. The inside of the tent now is decorated with a pretty pattern of reddish-brown splodges where these mosquitoes met their end.

Ali had been looking forward to the next day's ride for some time: it promised to be a long flat stretch through an area of sand dunes. In fact the dunes were covered in mature pine forest, so we could not see much sand, and the condition of the road was in places terrible: the tarmac was worn out and patched with huge dusty potholes. The road continued like this for twenty miles or so, straight as an arrow through the forest and passing no villages or houses. The whole of this area is a large park. It was amazing to think that it has been preserved from development so well, given the prices that coastal real estate must command. We stopped for the night at the little beach resort campsite of Praia de Quiaios. The campsite was nice, but where the previous nights campsite had specialized in mosquitoes, this one was notable for flies and ants. Out of interest I calculated that Portugal contains between one and ten thousand billion ants, and most of them have been in our food bag at one time or another. Ali has a fairly relaxed and benignly tolerant attitude to ants (and spiders) on the whole, occasionally reprimanding them if they get too invasive, but even she was starting to show signs of ant fatigue by the end.

Now we are staying the night in Figueira da Foz and taking the chance to update our website and book accommodation for our diving weeks in Albufeira (we should be there from 9 September for two weeks). The geezer who runs this internet cafe, we have decided, is singlehandedly the biggest twat out of all we have met so far in our whole trip (and that includes all the horn-happy Spanish truckers, and every one of the teenage yahoos who lean out of their car windows and yell as they speed past, so that is really saying something). Why? Well he has a rule that only one person may use a computer at any one time. Fair enough (just about, I suppose), so we duly rented two machines, side by side. I slid my wheeled office chair over to Ali's screen to look at what she was doing. No way: that was definitely against the rules, and the sound of my wheels bought him out of his office like a jack-in-the-box, alert for infringement. He grudgingly allowed me to talk to her, but only on condition that I didn't move my chair. What's more, he prowls around looking at what's on your screen from behind your shoulder. I'm just filling in time now using up my hour while Ali finishes up what she's doing (better not look in case I draw his attention) and then we'll go....